Sample Cases:
Business
Case 1 (Quality Control, Sampling)
Bundle Basket is a mail order company that allows consumers to custom
design gift baskets containing an assortment of beauty products. During
the holiday season, the organization designs and sells over 5,000 baskets
daily, with each basket containing between five and fifty items. Last
month, the company experienced a high volume of complaints on wrong products
being selected for these baskets. The company is interested in reducing
such complaints to 1% of total shipments. After determining the appropriate
sample size for each range of product size, on a daily basis, samples
are selected from the packaging area for inspection to ensure accuracy
of the products pulled. Today, the company is experiencing slightly less
than 1% of wrong product pulls, a 50% reduction from one month ago.
Business Case 2 (Inventory Forecasting)
ShoeForComfort is a catalog company which sells comfortable women's shoes
directly to consumers. During the past three months, the organization
test mailed a new creative catalog to a certain percentage of their database
in order to help boost sales. Due to the success of this new creative
catalog, the company is now facing catalog backorder challenges. The organization
decided to build several sales prediction curves using the past three
months' worth of sales information, which in turn were fed into the forecasting
system to fine-tune inventory levels. Today, the company is able to launch
the new creative catalog to a higher percent of the customers in their
database and catalog backorder is no longer a problem.
Business Case 3 Market Research, Loyalty)
SaveU$, a distributor of retail coupons for products and services, receives
incentive payments from participating retail stores for each coupon redeemed
therein by consumers. Rather than randomly selecting products and consumers
to target, SaveU$ analyzes purchasing patterns from major retail stores
and applies statistical techniques including regression, segmentation,
and neural networks to enhance its marketing efforts. As a result, SaveU$
is able to identify characteristics such as previous coupon redemption,
brand and/or store loyalty, lifestyle factors indicating product need,
etc., and adjust its consumer marketing efforts accordingly. The result
is a sizable increase in consumer coupon redemption, thereby generating
incremental revenue.
Business Case 4 (DOE, Market Research)
A specialty poultry producer has always had great success marketing their
product to restaurants and would like to understand the benefits, if any,
in marketing straight to the consumer. To handle any increase in production
they would also like to test a new roasting technique in a larger capacity
roaster which will also decrease roasting time. Market Research and analysis
were performed to understand the demand for the product and ROI for expanding
the business. Further, the new roasters and techniques were tested versus
the current process with respect to taste, resulting weight, time to roast,
energy consumption, etc.
BUSINESS
ANALYTICS
